text: I was able to find the root of issue. The problem was in the configuration of salt master. After every change of reactor config, I must run salt-call state.highstate command on master to sync reactor source code changes with it. I missed this step and thus my reactor config differed from my original source code in IDE. So once I ran mentioned command, everything became in sync. Thanks everybody for help! 
  
  P.S. regarding mentioned error, it occurred because I used kwarg in dev.sls for pillar and represented pillar as list: 
  
  &gt;     kwarg:
  &gt;      - pillar:
  &gt;          temp_var_transmit: {{ payload }}
  
  
  Kwarg can not contain a list in this case. It may contain key:value format only. So the correct way is either use without kwarg as I did or remove hyphen near pillar.